http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-760586.html
Council gives trio 5 percent raises
BY RAY GRONBERG : The Herald-Sun
gronberg@heraldsun.com
Aug 11, 2006 : 11:44 pm ET
DURHAM -- A unanimous Durham City Council has voted City Manager Patrick Baker and two other officials raises of 5 percent as a reward for work over the past year that in its opinion exceeded expectations.
The decision, which followed a closed-door evaluation Thursday, pushed Baker's salary from $153,200 to $160,860. The raise is retroactive to July 1, the start of the 2006-07 fiscal year, Mayor Bill Bell said.
Also receiving retroactive raises were City Attorney Henry Blinder and City Clerk Ann Gray.
Blinder -- the city's highest-paid employee -- will receive $175,703 a year, up from $167,336. Gray's salary is rising from $85,702 to $89,987. They and Baker are the only city employees hired and supervised directly by the council.
Members asked after the vote for their take on Baker's performance in the last year said he has city government on the right track, but faces a major challenge in the coming year as he launches a search for a new police chief.
Baker has "been a good, steadying influence as we've faced a number of issues this year," Councilman Mike Woodard said. "And I think he's taken a logical, reasonable approach to addressing the issues we've got."
Councilwoman Diane Catotti agreed.
"We definitely have issues, but are moving in the right direction and are not seeing the crisis management we saw in years past," she said.
Catotti and other council members acknowledged that the past year was far from trouble-free. The problems city government has faced include Durham's high homicide rate, fallout from the Duke lacrosse case and the resignation of two Baker-hired department heads only days or weeks after they joined the staff.
City operations also have sparked two legal battles: an illegal-termination lawsuit filed against the private-sector firm the city pays to run the Durham Area Transit Authority, and a request by a Department of Housing and Community Development accountant for anti-stalking restraining orders against his three supervisors.
The city's anti-crime efforts have produced mixed results.
After Durham experienced 35 homicides in 2005, Bell announced that an attempt to quell murder and gun crime would be this year's top priority for city government. But while homicides are down, the most recent statistics show that overall gun crimes increased by slightly more than 48 percent in the first quarter of 2006.
Still, council members credit Baker with helping stabilize the Police Department's staffing, and say the trouble Durham is having with gangs and other criminals is hardly unique.
"The problems we're talking about are universal, in city after city that I read about and travel to," Councilman Howard Clement said.
The lacrosse case has dominated headlines since late March. Advocates for the players have criticized the Police Department's work on the case, particularly its handling of a succession of photo lineups they say violated both state and local guidelines.
Baker received criticism after stepping in to rebut a review panel at Duke University that said campus administrators reacted slowly to the emerging controversy because Durham police advised them that the accuser wasn't credible.
The manager quickly made it clear that police had done nothing of the sort, at least through official channels.
After he spoke up, Duke officials conceded that a campus police officer had eavesdropped on a conversation a Durham police sergeant was having with his commanders via cell phone, as Durham police were trying to figure out what had happened.
Defense lawyers nonetheless claimed Baker's comments were improperly meant to prod police to adjust their story about the rape investigation, rather than to make a statement about how inter-departmental communication with Duke should be handled. City Council members stood by the manager, and this week one made it clear she's standing by police, too.
"I personally don't have a problem with the way our police investigated the lacrosse case," Catotti said. "I'm not holding that against anybody."
Nor were council members inclined to criticize Baker over the two department heads that quit shortly after their hiring.
One ran the city's information-technology office for about a month and resigned after his wife refused to move to this area. The other served as the city's solid-waste director for a week and left after an attempt to reduce the department's use of contract labor backfired and led to a series of missed trash collections.
Council members interviewed Friday singled out the search for a new police chief as the biggest challenge Baker will face in the coming months. Durham's current chief, Steve Chalmers, has announced that he's retiring at the end of 2007.
The search that ended with the hiring of Chalmers proved the undoing of Baker's predecessor, former City Manager Marcia Conner.
She twice tried to bypass Chalmers by going outside the department for a chief. But her first hire resigned after past domestic-violence allegations against him surfaced. The second declined to take the job after failing to reach a contract agreement.
Elected officials clearly don't want a replay of Conner's chief-search fiasco.
"That's a very, very important position and [Baker] has sufficient notice and lead time to begin preparing for that transition," Bell said. "We want him to be successful at that."
http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsletters/
Paper disappoints
Thankfully I visited the Web site of the Raleigh News & Observer on Sunday. Otherwise, I may not have read the most thorough and insightful update of the overall events regarding the Duke lacrosse trial that I've read since the incident became public in March. I've subscribed to The Herald-Sun for a decade, but was sincerely discouraged that I had to turn to Raleigh's newspaper to remain informed regarding the most contentious incident that's occurred in Durham since I've lived here.
TIM GABRIEL
Durham
August 12, 2006
Blogs and the Mainstream Press
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson137.html
UNgag the Duke Three Immediately
http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=gaynorm&date=060812
Lacrosse is just not my game
http://www.newsobserver.com/135/story/470200.html
(MUST READ - ANOTHER SMARTASS "JOURNALIST" CHIMES IN)
Dennis Rogers is otherwise known as the "Redneck in Residence".
The great majority of Americans want to be assured that all of the Duke Three personally that they are innocent of the heinous charges against them. They know the accuser is an ex-convict stripper/"escort" in hiding. But they wonder why Collin and Reade are so quiet and expect the innocent to proclaim their innocence, especially when the charges are so heinous.
That's BS. I don't wonder at all why Collin and Reade are so quiet. They are quiet because Joe Cheshire, Bob Bennett, et al have decided that such is the best strategy for now.
He needs a big cup of STFU.
That Catotti councilwoman who praised the LE lacrosse investigation is a far, far, left "progressive" ringingly endorsed by the NC Green Party.